Being able to accept payments on your WordPress website opens up huge potential for making money from what you do. Whether that’s selling products, services or something else, having the ability for someone to pay through your website makes selling simple.
There are a few ways to accept payments with WordPress and we will cover all of them.
We’ll cover payment gateways and WordPress payment plugins. We’ll cover the most popular ways to accept WordPress payments and the different uses you can put them to.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how to set up WordPress payments and what method to use to do it.
If you sell or work with money, you could benefit from accepting online payments.
In theory, you can add online payments to any website you like. However, it makes sense to only add them to websites that can utilize it to the full.
Websites like online stores, subscription websites, membership sites, LMS (Learning Management System) websites selling online courses, charities or nonprofit websites, service businesses and all manner of commercial websites can all leverage online payments.
Setting up WordPress payments is actually very straightforward. Like many things WordPress, the process includes a few steps but each is simple. Once broken down they can be completed by anyone, at any skill level.
Especially when you have us to walk you through everything!
Once you have created a WordPress website, there are four prerequisites you’ll need before setting up your WordPress payment options though:
- SSL
- Secure WordPress Website
- Good Website Design for User Experience
- Fast Secure Web Host
A payment gateway is a piece of software that acts as a middleman between the customer, your website and the payment processor. It’s a standalone app that connects to your website and to its own processor servers.
The idea is that you can accept PayPal or a credit card without having to process the transaction yourself or store credit card information on your website. In return for a small commission, the payment gateway handles everything using a secure app and a secure connection.
Here’s how it works:
- Your customer selects a product or service from your website
- They enter checkout and select a payment method
- This calls the payment gateway which appears to the customer
- The customer enters their payment details into the gateway app. This could be credit card, PayPal login or something else
- The gateway securely transfers the payment data to its payment servers
- The payment server contacts the credit card servers or PayPal and authorizes the payment (or not)
- If the payment is authorized, it tells the gateway that payment has been agreed
- The gateway informs your eCommerce platform that payment has been accepted
- Your website releases the product or service to download or delivery and informs the customer
- The gateway will transfer the funds to your bank account
- The transaction is complete
While there are quite a few steps in that process, it takes just a few seconds. It’s fast, secure and enables you to manage WordPress payments without having to actually handle any financial data.
There are a few payment gateways that work with WordPress.
They are:
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Authorize.net
- Amazon Pay
- Google Pay
- Apple Pay
- Square
- 2Checkout
- Braintree
As you have seen, while accepting WordPress payments via an online store is the norm, it isn’t the only way you can take payments using WordPress.
You can also use more traditional methods like WooCommerce, CartFlows and Easy Digital Downloads.
Selling online courses requires some form of Learning Management System, or LMS, to do well but you can sell courses without one if you wish.
As we’re all about doing something well, we’ll include three methods of selling online courses in WordPress using LMS.
Membership websites are becoming more common now ads are less lucrative. Enabling premium content in return for a subscription is the future for many news and special interest sites.
If you plan on launching something like this, accepting WordPress payments is going to be key. Two plugins that can help with that are MemberPress and WooCommerce Memberships.
The easiest way to accept donations in WordPress is to use the GiveWP plugin. It’s a premium plugin that costs from $175 per year but makes it easy to accept donations through WordPress.
Setting it up is super-easy:
- Install and activate GiveWP in WordPress
- Select Donations and Settings from the left menu of your WordPress dashboard
- Select the Payment Gateways tab and select your gateway of choice by checking the box
- Select that payment gateway’s text link at the top of the page
- Complete the form adding your email address, APIs and required information
- Select Add Form under Donations on the left to create a donation form
- Complete the form as required including donation amounts and donation goals
- Enable your completed form and select Publish
- Copy the Give Form Shortcode just above the Publish button
- Integrate that into your website wherever you want the donate form to appear
That’s the basics of accepting donations using WordPress and GiveWP.
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